


The Immortal & His Husband

by Crowlows19



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Dark Harry, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:40:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25446250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowlows19/pseuds/Crowlows19
Summary: Harry just wanted to live a quiet life. Severus just wanted to make spells. And then Tom Riddle came home and took over the world. AU.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Severus Snape, Harry Potter & Tom Riddle & Severus Snape, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, Tom Riddle & Severus Snape
Comments: 8
Kudos: 114





	The Immortal & His Husband

It had been well known that the Immortal, possibly the most famous wizard in the world, had returned to the world after spending nearly two decades away. His first known action after returning to Britain was to go home to his husband, another famous wizard most known for his time travel blunders in which an accident in the 90s had sent him hurtling to the 40s. It was currently unknown why the Immortal had left his husband in Britain while he’d gone to wherever he’d gone to. 

But while alone in their country estate, the Immortal’s husband had decided to stay busy. And so, when Tom Riddle eventually walked through the front door of the home he’d shared with Harry Tempus before he’d gone on his world travels, he walked into a home that had been filled with three cats, four owls, enough plants to fill five greenhouses, books scattered everywhere, a random Quaffle that had taken up permanent residence on the entryway table, and a fifteen-year-old boy who had apparently been there for quite a while.

“Who are you?” Tom asked when he ran into the boy eating his morning cereal while standing in the kitchen, wearing sleep pants, no shirt, and greasy hair in a bun. There were pillow lines on his face and marks on his back that Tom hadn’t seen since the orphanage. Someone had taken a belt to this boy on more than one occasion. 

“Severus,” the boy replied, mumbling around his cornflakes. 

“Why are you here?” Tom asked.

“I live here,” Severus told him. 

“For how long?”

“Three years,” Severus replied.

“Why?”

“I’m adopted.”

“By who?”

“You,” replied the boy, a small smirk on his face that told Tom the kid was very much enjoying the reaction that statement received. When Tom eventually tracked down his husband in their bedroom where he was sleeping in on that pleasant August morning, he would quickly learn about all of the strays Harry had taken in while he was gone, animal and human alike.

“But what about the boy?” Tom asked Harry as the other man dressed for the day and insisted on chattering about the litter of kittens some feral cat had produced a few years ago. Tom had expected to have a slightly cold welcome from Harry who had more or less moved on with his life while Tom had been out in the world pushing Magic beyond the known boundaries, stories of his adventures leaking to the papers and building him the kind of fame that was unprecedented in the Wizarding community. He hadn’t expected a child. 

“Met him when I was teaching a Defense seminar at Hogwarts,” Harry said. Since arriving in the past, having clearly been in a battle with torn robes, cuts, bruises, and other, more hidden, damage to his mind, Harry had been teaching others how to defend themselves. His lessons were brutal, Harry gave no leeway, but those who stuck around came out far stronger. Tom had.

“Since when do you adopt students?” Tom asked. 

“This one is different, darling,” Harry responded.

“How so?”

“Spoilers,” Harry replied with a smirk. The word was one Tom knew well and it indicated that they had ventured into timeline territory. The smirk usually meant that Tom was about to get sex. Harry had two methods when it came to flirting: violence and smirking. 

“Fine,” Tom said, crossing his arms, annoyed. Harry sent those annoying thoughts straight out of his mind the second he started pawing at his clothes. 

00000

They had one month before Severus went back to Hogwarts for his fifth year. He was a Slytherin, had about two and a half friends depending on the day, came from a violent home, and had a caustic wit to him that Tom found endearing. Quite honestly, Severus might have the sharpest tongue Tom had ever heard. His barbs landed him in hot water with Harry at least twice a week. 

Oil and water, those two. Tom couldn’t quite figure out why Harry wanted to keep the boy around. Tom liked him immediately but this was the kind of boy he found utterly fascinating. If Severus and Harry had been in school at the same time, Tom had no doubt that Harry would have punched Severus in the mouth. Just like Harry had punched Tom in the mouth a time or twenty. 

“What do you think?” Severus asked him two weeks after Tom had come home. He had wandered into the library looking for a book and had asked the boy to explain Harry’s shelving system to him (sorted by coolness, apparently) and the two had proceeded to fall into a discussion about theoretical magic. Severus’s intellectual ability was sky high according to the charts Tom was looking at. 

“What’s the end goal of this spell?” Tom asked him. He could tell well enough from the boy’s work that the spell would be a Dark one, meant to cut open a person and leave them bleeding. He wanted to hear the boy tell him, though.

“Defense,” Severus said. 

“Dark Magic shouldn’t be used for Defense,” Tom said instinctively, parroting something Harry had once drilled into his head when Tom had asked him to teach him how to fight. Harry had been adamant that Dark Magic was for offensive measures and that there was a time and place for it. Tom had learned through the years that Harry was someone you had to provoke into violence but woe to the person who did. Harry’s temper could be swift, heavy, and violent though he had mellowed over the years.

Severus pouted a little.

“You sound like Harry,” he said.

“Yes, well,” Tom smiled at him, “That’s what happens when you’re married to someone for thirty years. You start to sound and act like each other.”

“Haven’t you guys been separated for the last twenty years?” Severus asked.

“According to the Daily Prophet,” Tom smirked at him. “Try adding a jab at the end of the wand movement. It’ll add more power to your...defense. And don’t tell Harry.”

Severus smiled at him, looking perfectly pleased.

00000

Severus and Tom managed to get fairly close, very quickly. He could tell it rankled Harry a little who had been investing years into the boy only to have Tom be the favorite parent almost the second he walked through the front door. After all, Harry had been parenting this boy since he was twelve-years-old. Even though Harry had put Tom’s name on the paperwork, he was still technically a stranger.

“Don’t you dare teach him anything that could land him in Azkaban,” Harry had warned him one night. Tom had agreed without telling him about Severus’s ability to create his own one-way ticket to Azkaban without any help from Tom in the slightest. 

“Yes, dear,” he’d said. Harry had huffed in annoyance but hadn’t pressed the issue. He leaned back against the headboard of their bed and looked at him curiously. 

“I missed you when you were gone,” Harry said. 

“Oh really?” Tom asked teasingly, crawling up the bed, over Harry’s legs, to settle on top of him. Harry ran his fingers through his hair. 

“Of course,” Harry said. “I even missed having you poke around my brain. Felt weird, not feeling you there.”

Tom had been maneuvering himself through Harry’s mind for years. They had connected that way. Tom had learned what emotions felt like and how to tell them apart by rummaging around in Harry’s mind. He rarely looked at the other’s memories. Harry had always fought viciously when he got too close. He had never managed to throw him out but Tom didn’t like the feeling of distress that would pour out of Harry in waves whenever it happened. 

He preferred his husband happy and calm. Like he was right now. 

They locked eyes and Tom slipped in. It felt like coming home. 

00000

The first of September came quickly and they weren’t able to take the boy to the Hogwarts Express. Because of the intense media attention on his return to Britain, they weren’t about to suddenly appear on Platform 9 3/4. They had talked about it but Severus had looked a little green thinking about all those people looking at him, something Harry had seen immediately and had kicked his protective instincts into overdrive. And so, Tom had prepared the boy a slightly illegal Port Key and they had said goodbye on the front porch instead of in front of the train. 

Harry’s face turned sad the second the boy was out of sight.

“You make a wonderful mother,” Tom said, sarcasm dripping from his words, though he had actually meant it. Harry had taken to parenting like a duck to water. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Harry replied and Tom could sense a dark mood coming. Harry’s dark moods usually ended with something being broken.

“Sweetheart,” Tom said, cupping Harry’s face in his hands. “He’ll be home for Christmas.”

“He’s bullied, you know,” Harry told him. “I’m worried about him.”

Tom thought about the boy’s ‘defense’ spell.

“He can defend himself,” he said, lightly kissing his husband on his lips. 

“Tell me about what you’ve been up to,” Harry said. Tom didn’t ask why Harry hadn’t kept up with the stories in the paper. Harry had never trusted the papers and it was mostly fake anyway. Tom hadn’t wanted the world to know all about what he’d really been up to. He hadn’t even put it in his already carefully coded letters home. He had been prepared to tell his husband the whole story when he’d walked through the front door after being gone for the last twenty years. Harry, however, had refused to talk about it with Severus in the house. He was convinced the boy was eavesdropping on them at all times. 

Tom was inclined to agree after one too many veiled comments about things the boy shouldn’t have known. 

He rubbed at the back of Harry’s shoulder through his shirt. There was a tattoo there. One Tom loved to kiss. 

He whispered about his time away and his future plans as he and Harry made love that night. Harry had shivered more than once, but whether it was from where Tom had his hand or the words he’d whispered was hard to say. After all, while his hand was making Harry feel good, his words were about committing cold-blooded murder. A lot of murder. 

He should have told Harry everything then and there. He hadn’t though. He’d kept his true plans a secret for the most part. He knew Harry and he knew that when it came to this, asking for forgiveness would get him far more than asking for permission. 

00000

The media attention on them had been incredibly stressful for Harry. Tom had always known that Harry hated public attention. He had hated it when he was the time-traveling Gryffindor and he had hated it when Tom had first discovered immortality. He had mostly locked himself away in their home, hiding. Meanwhile, Tom was in meetings all over the country. As soon as Severus had gone back to school, Tom had gotten to work, Harry had started training again, and the plan continued as it always had. 

Harry had no idea what he was training but he did it anyway when Tom had suggested it. Tom mostly kept Harry cloistered away in their country home. His husband had never gotten along with his Slytherins and Tom saw no reason to provoke Harry. The more time he spent in Harry’s mind the more he was able to recognize that he had been gone too long. 

He had known since they were at Hogwarts that Harry’s mind was not quite right. Tom had spent quite a bit of time stitching back together the small tears. When he’d left, Harry had been in a better state of mind than he’d been in his entire time with Tom. And his mind had probably been just fine for a decade or so. But Tom could see the fraying edges. 

Tom was spending most nights in Harry’s mind, stitching it back together. 

00000

“Severus is being bullied,” Harry told him one night as Tom moved around the bedroom getting ready for bed. Harry was reading a letter from Hogwarts that they had just received. The timing was odd and suggested that Severus had sent it after dinner. 

“Is that what the letter says?” Tom asked. 

“No,” Harry said. “But I can read between the lines.”

“What does it actually say?”

“That everything is fine.”

“And that means he’s being bullied?” Tom asked, genuinely confused. Harry glared at him. 

“He’s being bullied,” Harry insisted. 

“Why do you think that?” he asked, curious. Harry had been warning him about Severus’s bullying problem for a while now. He had also become increasingly convinced that Harry knew something about Severus’s future. This wasn’t a boy he had just come across in the past but had never actually known in his own time. This was someone that Harry had wanted to keep an eye on and then decided to keep for himself. Much like Tom. He was certain there would be more of these cases as they got closer and closer to Harry’s time of origin. 

“He says everything is fine but he was sending this letter because he needed to get out of the castle for a while. Be alone,” Harry told him. Tom thought that was curious. When Severus wrote to Tom it was about projects, spells, and complicated theory. When he wrote to Harry it was to sarcastically answer questions about his well being. He wasn’t aware of Severus ever writing to Harry about his feelings.

“Does he write letters like that to you often?” Tom inquired. Harry shrugged.

“Couple times a semester,” he said. “He doesn’t ever give me details. He knows I’ll flip out. But I know.”

“Spoilers?” Tom asked, using Harry’s own word. It was the first time since they’d met that Tom had blatantly asked if Harry knew something specific about someone’s future. He usually stayed far away from that quagmire.

“Spoilers,” Harry agreed. “This will be the worst year of his entire Hogwarts career.”

Harry looked distraught, an emotion Tom had never been good with helping him through. So he didn’t say anything; he just let Harry read that letter over and over again. And then he let Harry burn it in the fireplace in their bedroom. 

00000

When Tom had left for his travels the only person he’d given any information to was Harry. He had asked Harry to do exactly one thing while he was gone and that was to stay away from all of his contacts and allies. This was something Harry had been perfectly willing to comply with to that point that he had happily broken three of Avery’s ribs and cursed out Malfoy in a restaurant. The latter incident had made the evening paper and three separate celebrity magazines. 

Tom’s exit from Magical Britain was so abrupt that his gang of Slytherins, long graduated but still loyal, had been convinced that Harry had done something to him. Tom’s supposed immortality had just been leaked to the press and while it was basically an unconfirmed rumor at that point, his old school friends considered it to be real. They wouldn’t put anything past Tom at this point. 

At the same time, they also knew Harry fairly well though none of them would consider themselves to be his friend. Years of close proximity and detailed discussions regarding the weird relationship between their leader and the time-traveling Gryffindor had led to self-proclaimed expertise on the topic of Harry and Tom, The Couple. When Tom all but disappeared and Harry didn’t look upset, they convinced themselves that Harry had stashed Tom somewhere or perhaps had figured out a way to reverse his newly acquired immortality. 

Such was their concern that they reported him missing to the Auror Department, an act that had immediately leaked to the Daily Prophet and had been the discussion at every breakfast table less than twenty-four hours after they filed the report. The resulting public outcry had led to the Ministry sending their best Auror, Alastor Moody to Harry’s doorstep. Harry had answered the door, politely invited the man inside, and proceeded to tell Auror Moody seemingly every complaint Harry had ever had about his husband.

Tom was selfish, rude, and egotistical. Tom had never washed a dish in his life and he stole Harry’s quills. Tom had forgotten their anniversary the year before because he was hyper-focused on some project Harry couldn’t even begin to comprehend the theory of. Tom’s behavior of late had been weird and he’d started snoring. Tom refused to admit that he was snoring. Tom was mad at him when Harry stopped letting him have dairy because he was convinced it stop the snoring. They had spent nearly an hour on Tom’s snoring alone.

When Alastor Moody had finally gotten a word in to ask where Harry’s husband had gone to, Harry had replied, “Off being ridiculous.”

He’d then produced the note that Tom had left behind. It detailed that Tom was off to finish some project in Albania, he wasn’t sure when he’d return, but he’d write soon. Harry had not shown the Auror the second note he’d written with Harry’s instructions. Harry had burned that already, mostly out of anger than any real precaution. 

Moody had returned to the Ministry three hours after he’d departed, closed the case, and told Abraxas Malfoy that Tom had simply left without saying anything to anyone, Harry had come home one day to find a goodbye note. Disconcerting for someone so steeply involved in Magical society but not actually a crime. Nobody had expected him to be gone as long as he was, but the longer he was away the easier it was to forget that he had ever been there even as other countries printed his exploits in their local news, and the stories filtered back to the Daily Prophet, secondhand. 

When he showed up at a restaurant where this old Slytherin gang had gathered for Abraxas Malfoy’s birthday, the private room they’d rented out had been deathly silent. His friends, their wives, and their children hadn’t known what to say to this sudden reappearance. He still looked the same as he did when he’d left twenty years ago, further evidence of his immortality, and he was pleased to see that his mere presence had struck them speechless. Whereas Harry’s silence had been stony and full of unsaid nasty comments, their’s held a note of reverence beneath it.

“So,” he said, taking the only empty seat between two of the teenagers he didn’t know. “What have I missed?”

The news broke a few days later that Tom Riddle had come home at last. 

00000

Tom had been fielding questions from reporters every time he walked through the atrium of the Ministry of Magic. He had meetings lined up with nearly every department and later that day he was being voted into the Hogwarts Board of Governors. The Head Governor position had been recently vacated, something Tom had asked Mulciber to arrange, and he was quite ready to fill the seat. He didn’t foresee there being too much of an issue; unprecedented levels of fame and fortune had the tendency to pave the way to seemingly lesser positions quite nicely. 

Today, he was meeting with the Head of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts office. Harry had given him an odd look but hadn’t bothered to ask further questions. After all, he had been putting up with Tom’s strange actions for thirty years, mostly with eye rolls and sarcastic comments, but after twenty years apart Harry mostly maintained a cool disinterest. Even when they were making love these days, Harry was remarkably disinterested. Tom knew he could sweet-talk his way back into favor. It would just take time. 

The Head of the office, a strange woman named Mariah Toltec, was a Muggleborn who had graduated Hogwarts only five years ago and who’s no-nonsense, Hufflepuff demeanor had left her a rising star in all things Muggle related. And while most people in the Ministry didn’t take much stock in her skill set, Tom was thoroughly aware that her professional connections in the Muggle world would prove useful at some point. 

It also helped that she was utterly starstruck by him. 

“My friends have been sending me Owls all week,” she told him, eyes gleaming and a wide beam on her face. “They’re dying to know everything.”

He smiled at her sweetly but couldn’t help but think that Harry would have rolled his eyes and said something disparaging about not feeding into Tom’s ego. 

“Well, I hope you only report good things, Miss Toltec,” he said, sipping from the tea she gave him and making an extra effort to make sure the smile reached his eyes. She blushed. 

And then she gave him a promise of introducing him to her contact in Scotland Yard. 

It had been a perfectly successful meeting, all things considered. 

The only bad part had been running into Fleamont Potter. Tom had known the second he’d first met Potter that he was somehow related to Harry. Anyone with eyes could see that family resemblance and the Potters had made no efforts to disconnect themselves from those rumors even though Harry had very much refused to participate in them. Tom had thought it curious that Harry preferred to live as an orphan than to claim his place in the family. Surely it wouldn’t alter the timeline that much? After all, Harry had been hinting for a while that the timeline was pretty much ruined anyway. 

“Mr. Riddle,” Fleamont greeted and Tom nodded. “It’s lovely to have you back. How have you been?”

The real trouble in dealing with someone like Fleamont Potter was that everything he said, he meant. There were no double meanings to play with, no underlying challenge, nothing to twist and turn. Tom thought him a perfectly boring man. 

“Quite well, Fleamont,” he replied. “And yourself? I hear you have a boy at Hogwarts now.”

“Yes, James,” Fleamont said happily. “He’s a fifth-year now. Heading into those dreaded O.W.L.s! But I don’t have to tell you about that. I remember you got more than anyone.”

Tom just smiled, not acknowledging the compliment. Getting a lot of O.W.L.s was not actually his greatest accomplishment, after all. 

“Anyway,” Fleamont continued, “I just wanted to welcome you home. I won’t keep you. It’s about dinner time, you know.”

“Thank you,” Tom replied and they parted ways. He did in fact have dinner plans at Malfoy Manor. Abraxas wanted him to meet his son Lucius. Tom had heard about him from Severus who seemed to think that Lucius walked on water. That alone had piqued his interest. 

00000

"Severus, what the fuck happened to your face?" was the very first thing that Harry said to Severus when the boy walked into the kitchen for Christmas break, having just been Port Keyed home from the train station. The media fervor had yet to die down and at this point, Tom had a very strong feeling that Severus was actively hiding the fact that he had been adopted. 

He wondered why. Being Tom’s son would be very advantageous for him in Slytherin. Even if it did come with the added baggage of an overprotective, Gryffindor mother hen. 

“Nice to see you too,” Severus replied. “How were the last four months for you? Mine was fine, thank you for asking.”

Tom smirked into his whiskey as Harry glared at him and brandished the wooden spoon in his hand as if it was a wand and not covered in the sauce he was making for the pasta. 

“Answer the question,” he demanded.

“You look like you went a couple of rounds,” Tom said calmly, hoping to stave off an argument. Severus’s left eye had a deep bruise under it and his lip was split. He’d clearly been in a fistfight. “Did you at least win?”

“Don’t encourage him!” Harry exclaimed, scandalized, his head in the icebox as he prepared an ice pack for Severus’s eye. The boy tried to hide a smile. 

“It’s not a big deal,” he said, shyly. 

“Who did you get in a fight with?” Tom asked, casually wondering how long Harry would let him handle it. His mind sort of boggled at the thought of having a child. Severus mostly took care of himself which was helpful unlike Harry’s most recent stray, a three-legged wolfhound he lovingly called Fluffy. At the very least, Tom enjoyed Severus’s letters from Hogwarts. He received more correspondence from the boy than Harry did which was probably because Tom was helping him with his Runes project while Harry kept asking him if he’d eaten all his vegetables. 

Really, Harry’s mothering was an endless source of entertainment for him. It was such an interesting aspect of Harry’s rather brutal, rough and tumble personality. His husband was an athlete and a born warrior, so this gentle side of him was something Tom always thought interesting every time he saw it. 

Like now, when Harry pressed the cold pack to Severus’s eye and held it there for him rather than letting the boy administer to his own wounds. Harry rested one hand on the back of the boy’s neck and Tom knew that all he really wanted to do was hug the kid, an action that would likely end in another fistfight. 

“Do you even know how to throw a punch?” Harry asked through gritted teeth. 

“Yes,” Severus said, sounding thoroughly offended. Tom took another drink of whiskey just to keep himself from laughing. 

“Leave the boy alone, Harry,” Tom said, drawing the other man’s glare. “He just stepped through the door and he clearly had a bad day. We could at least feed him first.”

“You just want dinner,” Harry snapped but he did move back to the stove to finish cooking and left the cold pack in Severus’s hand. The boy dropped it on the table, uninterested.

“I’ve been working all day!” Tom responded, gesturing for Severus to take the chair right next to him. Severus sat down and Tom took the opportunity to look more closely at the boy. More specifically, his hands. Severus’s hands were clean and unmarked. If he had been in a fight he had either defended himself with only his wand or hadn’t defended himself at all. Tom rather hoped it was the former. 

“Who did you fight with?” he asked quietly, hoping that Harry’s furious banging around would cover up their words. 

“Just some Gryffindors,” he mumbled. 

“You know,” Tom said with the air of a secret, and Severus automatically leaned forward, eager to hear any secret he told him. “I used to fight with a Gryffindor back in my day; he almost broke my jaw once.”

“Then why did you marry him?” Severus asked, his eyes darting to Harry’s back.

“Because he wasn’t a bully,” Tom said. Severus looked him in the eye almost as if he couldn’t help it. He looked scared. “Are you being bullied?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Severus said, denying it out of instinct. They may have started to bond but Tom was still the Immortal, Harry the time traveler, and Severus the little broken Slytherin with a bad history and no trust. 

“Yes, you do,” Tom said. “You’re being bullied and I want to know by who. Now.”

Severus would never say it outright but eye contact was all that Tom really needed. He could pull it out of the boy’s mind easily enough although Harry was pretty angry when the boy fainted from the assault and ended up on the floor. 

But at least Tom had names and faces, even if he never did get to eat his dinner.

00000

“You’re an ass,” Harry threw over the breakfast table the next morning. Severus munched on his cereal and watched them argue with vague interest. 

“I wanted the truth,” Tom defended. “And since neither of you is interested in giving it to me, I took it. Besides, he’s fine. Aren’t you, Severus?”

“I’m fine,” the boy said automatically. 

“That’s bullshit,” Harry responded, stabbing at his eggs furiously. “He’ll say anything you ask him to and you know it.”

“But I’m fine,” Severus insisted and this time it sounded believable. At least to Tom’s ears. Harry glared at Tom anyway. Harry turned a hard look at Severus. 

“You,” he said through his teeth, jabbing his fork at the boy. “No more fights, you hear me?”

“But I didn’t start it!” Severus defended, sounding perfectly victimized. 

“I don’t care!” Harry snapped. “No more fights!”

“Harry,” Tom said, stepping in. As much as Harry hadn’t wanted Tom to invade the boy’s mind, it had given them quite the advantage. He had seen the fight for himself. Every sordid detail of it. “Not everyone can defend themselves as you can.”

The silence at the table was deafening.

“May I be excused?” Severus finally asked. 

“Yes,” Harry said but he watched the boy sadly as he all but fled the kitchen. “What did you see?”

“I remember a time when even you had difficulty with four attackers at the same time,” Tom told him. Harry eyed him coldly. 

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Harry snapped, offended. Tom covered his hand, feeling the cold steel of Harry’s wedding ring against his palm. 

“Sweetheart,” Tom said sweetly, using a tone of voice that always made Harry soften. “Why don’t you teach him how to throw a punch at least?”

“So he can get in a brawl?”

“So he can stop getting black eyes,” Tom said. “Besides, I’m sure you can teach him plenty of self-control.”

And that was how Severus Snape spent his Christmas break learning how to fight. It would be decades before he could beat Harry in a fair spar but when he went back to school that January he had at least learned how to punch something without breaking his own hand. 

00000

“I told you,” Harry seethed. Severus had been back at school less than a week when they’d received an urgent Owl from Hogwarts detailing a brutal fistfight in the Charms corridor. 

“How do you know this is his fault?” Tom asked as they walked to the castle from where they’d apparated just outside the gates. Tom was in rather fine robes having conducted multiple meetings that day, Harry was dressed in his preferred Muggle style. They were exact opposites in every way; Tom sometimes marveled at the fact that they were even together. 

“Because I was right,” he seethed.

“You don’t even believe that,” Tom teased, slipping his hand into Harry’s. “You think he was attacked just like I do.”

“Fine,” Harry said. “But I’m still right.”

“Yes, dear.”

00000

Dumbledore’s office was actually quite crowded with five sets of parents and five boys all crammed inside. Tom and Harry were the last to arrive and when they did, a silence fell on the room. Walburga and Orion, both old classmates of theirs, rose to shake their hands. 

“We didn’t know you had adopted,” Orion said. Behind him, his son Sirius looked as if he was chewing glass. 

“It’s been a long time Orion,” Tom reminded him. The Blacks had been out of favor lately, mostly because Harry and Walburga couldn’t be in the same room with each other before something was set on fire. It was a long and bitter feud that went back to their early Hogwarts days. 

Orion nodded in acknowledgment. He should have been one of Tom’s closet allies but at the time of Orion and Walburga’s marriage, the Black family hadn’t quite believed that Tom was anything more than an uppity orphan who would fade as soon as the ink on his diploma was dry. Tom hadn’t minded; the Blacks were clearly on a downward slide to irrelevance anyway.

Tom nodded at Fleamont in acknowledgment as he and Harry took seats on either side of Severus, whose lip was once again bleeding. 

“Now that we’re all here,” Dumbledore said, “I think it’s past time that the feud between these boys is addressed. We can’t have brawls in the corridors.”

“What happened?” Walburga asked. Her tone was light and Tom couldn’t tell if she was bored or interested. Her ability to deceive had greatly increased in the time he’d been away.

“That hasn’t been made clear,” Dumbledore replied, eyeing the teenagers in front of him, a small look of disappointment on his face when he looked at each of them. “But I do know that the fight was broken up by several teachers, one of whom has lost a tooth.”

Harry shifted uncomfortably as if he was about to be accused of something unpleasant. Tom tried not to laugh. 

“Would you boys like to speak up for yourselves?” Dumbledore asked. 

James Potter spoke up almost before Dumbledore had finished the sentence. 

“Snape threw the first punch,” he said. “We were just trying to stop him.”

“He just went crazy,” Sirius Black said, joining in. 

It went on from there and honestly, Tom was bored enough that he eventually tuned them out. Potter, Black, and two other boys he didn’t know. He was more interested in watching Severus and Harry. 

His husband was looking at the boy intently as if trying to read his mind while Severus stared determinedly at the floor, refusing to look up or speak on his own behalf. But Tom knew that James’s account of the fight was a lie. Severus’s knuckles weren’t bruised. If the fight had happened the way these other boys were claiming, Severus’s knuckles would bear that evidence, not just his face. 

Finally, the fervor died down and Dumbledore looked at the little family in the corner, one of them concerned, one bored, and one mortified. 

"Severus," Dumbledore prodded. "Do you have anything to say?"

Severus didn't even bother to look up but Harry did. Tom was curious about the look in his eye. It was a look he recognized; one that was purely dark fury. It had been years since he'd seen such a thing. In fact, Tom hadn't seen that look since Harry had forced him to close the Chamber of Secrets. He'd almost broken one of Tom's ribs then; he vaguely wondered if someone here was about to get a broken bone. He dearly hoped it didn't end up being him. 

Harry eyed the other families over Severus's head and then turned a steely eye on Dumbledore.

"You don't actually believe that he started a fight while outnumbered do you?" he asked. Harry and Dumbledore eyed each other. Tom had the sudden thought that Harry and Dumbledore had fallen out in the twenty years he'd been gone. He made a mental note to ask about that. Dumbledore raised an eyebrow at him as if he was calling Harry out. And then he actually did.

"I recall you doing that very thing in your seventh year," Dumbledore replied gently. Harry scowled deeply.

"Severus isn't me," he seethed. Tom tensed; their old classmates tensed; Fleamont slowly reached to where his wand rested; the portraits went still. Anyone who knew what Harry was capable of looked incredibly worried at that moment. Severus actually looked up from his shoes to watch him contemplatively. Then he turned and looked at Tom questioningly. It shouldn't have been a surprise to the boy who had been slowly but surely learning about Harry’s penchant for being dangerous but somehow the boy was indeed surprised. 

Tom smiled at him and winked, faking a calmness he didn’t feel in the slightest. Rather he was more interested in trying to figure out how likely Harry was to losing control. Would he dive over the desk or would his Magic blow out the windows? It was impossible to predict. 

“It doesn’t matter who started the fight,” Tom cut in, drawing the attention of the room. “What matters is that it happened at all. I know for a fact this isn’t their first dust-up, so the question is, why are these boys getting into so many physical altercations at all?”

“Isn’t there a way to just keep them away from each other?” some mousy looking woman in the corner asked. “They clearly just don’t get along.” 

“Do something,” Harry said and the room’s attention swiveled back to him. He stood up. Tom stood up as well, prepared to physically stop him if needed. Harry looked incredibly upset. Dumbledore eyed him wearily. It was clear to Tom that Dumbledore was also wondering if Harry would lose control. Harry hadn’t been much involved with the Wizarding World when Tom left. No one really knew his state of mind anymore.

“Dumbledore,” Harry said tightly. “I’m warning you, you have to do something. Now. In this moment. You have to do something.”

Harry had never, in his entire time in the past, ordered someone to act or not act based on the knowledge he had of the future. What was it about this moment that required intervention? What would intervention here even do? 

But Dumbledore got the hint. 

All five boys were suspended for two weeks.

00000

Severus had refused to speak to Harry for days, believing that he was being punished for something he hadn’t started and hadn’t even ended. The boy was outright convinced that Harry had gotten him suspended on purpose and Tom wasn’t entirely certain if the boy’s over-emotional assessment of the situation was even that off the mark. 

“I’m not explaining myself,” Harry said to the boy one morning as he set down a plate of eggs in front of the sullen teenager. Severus looked up, surprised. He’d clearly been expecting a lecture. “I did what I did to try and keep something worse from happening. And that’s all you need to know.”

Harry had left the kitchen and absconded in the library. 

“What’s he mean?” Severus asked Tom. He looked at the boy closely and shrugged. 

“I have no idea, Severus,” Tom said. “He does that when he can’t say.”

“Because of the time travel thing?” Severus asked. Tom nodded. The boy was silent for a while until, “He said the same thing about my adoption. I asked why he cared and all he said was that it was complicated. He said to ask him again on his birthday in 1996.”

“I get that same answer all the time,” Tom told him. “Apparently that’s when his knowledge will run out. He’ll have all the same answers we do by then.”

“Humph,” Severus huffed. “He should tell us now. We’re family, he can trust us.”

“He can trust you,” Tom corrected. Severus looked shocked. 

“Can’t he trust you?” the boy asked.

“Sometimes,” Tom said. 

“Can I trust you?” Severus asked. 

“Always.”

00000

A few days after the suspension had run its course and the boy was returned to school, Tom came home from a dinner party with some of the wizarding world’s top society families. It had been a productive evening. Tom had learned some information, blackmailed a couple of people and had too much wine. 

He crawled into bed, pressing himself to Harry’s side. Ever a light sleeper, Harry groggily wrapped an arm around him. Tom pressed his lips to the side of Harry’s neck hoping to wake him further. 

“You should go to sleep,” Harry said in response and Tom hissed at him in Parseltongue

“Be with me,” he said. 

“I’m always with you,” Harry hissed back. Then he switched to English. “We’re married. Remember?”

“Are you still angry with me for leaving?” Tom asked him. He’d been home for nearly nine months now. He wanted to know if he was still in trouble. 

“You could have told me you wanted to go,” Harry said instead of answering. “I wouldn’t have been upset. I know you. I love you.”

“I know,” Tom replied. Harry didn’t ask him why he’d done it the way he did if he knew he hadn’t needed to simply run away. He could have just told Harry he was off to do something. Harry probably wouldn’t have even asked for too many details. He would have simply asked if they were still married. Instead, Tom had left with nothing but a quick set of instructions and a decoy note that Harry could show to people. 

Don’t involve yourself with the old gang.

Don’t tell anyone I gave you this second note. 

Don’t divorce me.

I’ll be back for you.

“Are you planning on ever doing it again?” Harry asked. 

“No,” Tom said truthfully, burrowing into Harry as far as he could. He had missed this more than anything. This closeness, the sense that someone in this world knew what he was saying even if he didn’t say the words. The sense that there was a person in this world he didn’t have to explain himself to because that person just knew. Tom had missed that above all else. 

They’d had sex plenty of times since he’d returned home but there had always been an underlying current of anger to Harry’s kisses, his hands, and his thrusts. When he entered Tom that night, Harry was calmer, gentler, and far slower to the end as if he wanted to savor every moment. There was no frenzied need, just the simple enjoyment of being wrapped up in Tom and of Tom being wrapped up in him. 

That was when Tom knew he’d been forgiven.


End file.
